Review Blog

IDEA:Nick Dunne returns home on his anniversary to find his wife mysteriously missing, commencing a police investigation and a media circus that implicate him in her murder.

BLURB:Gone Girl is a deliriously trashy psychological thriller with lacerating sociological implications, a funhouse mirror whose distortions endeavor to cut right through reality. In other words, it’s satire, but a particularly smart and deceptive one: Fincher and Flynn have effectively turned the framework for a B-grade pulp story into the fulcrum upon which layers of irony and social commentary pivot. Their often abrasive employment of tropes, their alternate reveling in and upending of gender stereotypes, and their increasing unraveling of narrative logic, in which credulity is forcefully and unapologetically strained, serve the dual purposes of galvanizing audiences’ attentions and making them vividly cognizant of the representations – in the media or otherwise – they are so ready to accept and reinforce. Despite its slight bloat and disappointing lack of visual ideas, Gone Girl is absolutely ripe with subtext, a sneakily self-aware examination of false appearances and culturally perpetuated representations that is constantly presenting itself one way and then defying itself the next. How we react to it corresponds with what it says about us, as a society seemingly always posing questions and absorbing images, but rarely actually seeing.